What is Natural? (A Parable)

  There once was a girl named Jane.  When she was in her early teens she would announce almost every day to everyone around her how much she delighted in being a woman and a Christian.  She sang songs about Christian femininity, and she had a green canvas knapsack with "Ovaries Are A Gift From God: Use Them Responsibly!" on it.  She campaigned ceaselessly against abortion, though she herself had never been pregnant and was not, of course, sexually active.  But she could be found many weekends, standing with a small group of middle-aged ladies in front of restaurants with signs depicting scarlet bloody abortions.  She did not think this at all strange or unnatural for a teenaged girl. It was what teenaged Christian girls should all do.  It was what Jesus would have done.

  "Remember every day to be as grateful as you should be that you were born with the ability to Bear Children for Christ, or you just might LOSE that ability!" she would tell her friends, if they played organized sports, got short haircuts, or went outside without their makeup.  She was always troubled when girls around her did not act as she felt they should.

  Every morning she got up early and had her vitamins and daily chapter of scripture from her little tan bible.  Every night she either went to an evening church activity or watched an episode of Touched By An Angel, Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman or Road to Avonlea and retired early.  Still, no teenaged boys showed any abiding interest in her or her obedience to scripture and interest in bearing Christian babies.

  As she approached twenty, she started to become increasingly restless.  "I'm a woman.  I should be pregnant" she mused.  "It's what Jesus wants. What is wrong with men?  Only interested in One Thing."  She daily sang her songs about the privilege of being born female and Christian, and wrote poems about loving to sing about Jesus, fallopian tubes and uteri, and derived some small satisfaction from them, but still she fretted.

  "What kind of a woman am I?" she eventually despaired.  "I should be pregnant for Jesus, and I'm not.  What good is it being female if I'm not going to have a baby? I'm of prime child-bearing age.  I'm wasting it!"

  To try to improve her attitude toward her Special Burden (and to meet godly Christian young men), she took courses in Christian Women's Studies at venerable old, red brick Blessed Triumphant Savior College (not accredited).  For eight years she worked part-time at a little Christian book store to be able to afford these courses.  She went to bed early each night and woke up bright and early each morning, filled with an undying resolve to do what she'd been Designed For one day. To do what Jesus wanted her to do.

   Eventually Geoff, one of the professors at Blessed Triumphant Savior College, consented to marry her. He was young and keen, having himself only gotten his PhD from bible college (unaccredited by man's Academic system) the year previous. She'd come to his office wanting clarification on some of the finer points of Proverbs 31, but he'd wanted to lecture on the Song of Songs.  

  "The bible is a book filled throughout with lyrics of various kinds by sundry authors," he'd intoned, looking off somewhere above and an only occasionally stealing glances at her, sitting there in her jean skirt and pink "Abortion Is Murder" cardigan.  "But only that one ancient Semitic poem cycle commonly attributed to Solomon is sometimes called 'The Song of Songs.' Very telling. And that entire work is a quite frank, lyrical depiction of erotic love and acts associated with those ancient, very natural feelings.  So, according to the editors, translators and book titlers of the very Word of God itself, the best song, the arch-song, as it were, the over-song, a Song Above All Songs, is a song about...sex.  From this earth-shattering scriptoerotic epiphany we have to humbly agree that all of the very best songs, from time immemorial right up to the present day with its Katy Perry and its Justin Bieber, are without exception, always and only about that very scripture-sanctioned, divinely-approved topic. Eros."  And then he looked directly at her for just a moment, as if he'd said something daring.

  The wedding was all Jane had hoped for.  For that one day, she was the princess she'd always imagined she was when she was little and had imagined Jesus as her Fairy Godmother.  Everything was white.  The dresses, the tuxes, the cake, the chairs, the bunting.  All were the same radiant white.  Everyone there (besides the catering staff of course) was as well.  It looked so pure and holy.  It cost a fortune, but it was so worth it. It was just what Jesus wanted of a young Christian woman who just really wanted to please him.

  Jane breathed a giant sigh of relief in her life.  Now things were going to work out.  Now she could do what she'd been Made to Do.  Now she could REALLY serve Jesus, as a meek, submissive, grateful wife.  She could begin filling the world with the Christian-raised fruit of her very womb, just like the apostle instructed all Christians to do. And she could home-school her children to preserve them from the secular taint that less loving Christian mothers weekly exposed their wretched little get to, sending them daily on that big yellow bus to that reeking pit of rank humanism.

  Geoff continued to teach at the Christian college, where he was spending more and more time lately.  Every morning Jane took her vitamins and read her chapter of scripture (often reading Proverbs 31), and every Saturday night, she made love to her husband.  Just as Jesus wanted.  Naturally, she refused to engage in any kind of sexual activity which was unlikely to result in her conceiving a child.  

  But the months rolled on apace, and with every month came, as regular as clockwork, her inescapable menses.  Like wretched Hannah of old, every month she sat on their gleaming white toilet and wept bitter tears.  "How I have failed my Lord!  It is fitting that my eyes cry these salty tears even as my womb cries bloody ones, mourning the death of yet another potential Child of God!" she cried.  "What am I doing wrong?" she wondered. It had to be something.

  Had it been that time when she'd cut her hair shorter than usual and Geoff hadn't liked it?  Had it been her tendency to sometimes argue to an unseemly degree with her husband (strangely, often on Saturday nights)? Well, it was so difficult to submit to such an ungodly man!  Had it in fact been the result those few occasions she'd let her (clearly hypocritical, unloving and depraved) husband lead her astray into Unproductive Acts?  There'd even been that one time when she'd almost felt she'd liked... but then she cast that unworthy thought from her like a live viper, and continued weeping, soul-searching and praying.  Because that's what Jesus wanted.

  Whatever it was, she knew it was her fault she wasn't conceiving.  Oh yes, it was very tempting to blame Geoff and his depravity, but she'd been raised well enough to know not to act like Eve blaming Adam for her own disobedience.  Her duty to successfully bring healthy, pinkly Christian babies to term was hers and hers alone.  It was what a Christian woman did for God. Something was disrupting that delicate relationship between Jane and her Saviour...  Was it the presence of too many garishly secular woman's magazines in their house, like insidious tares among the good wheat of the more modestly hued Christian ones?  And sometimes the wrong kind of secular ones?  (The kind which told women how to orgasm, rather than how to make casseroles and sweaters?) Sometimes she just couldn't wait in line at the supermarket without being led astray by one of those... As her mother used to ominously quote from her old King James Bible "What hast thou in thy house?"

  Two years went by and she purged the house of all secular magazines in a manner which Geoff insisted was, but she denied was anything like, superstitious.  Either way, it was obvious that spiritually, she was keeping her fingers crossed.  She made it clear to her husband that if it wasn't Saturday evening, and if it wasn't a Saturday evening when his seed was likely to Take Root in her, and if the act wasn't even designed to implant a blooming heaven-sent baby in her God-given abdominal birth arena, then the pearly, glistening Gates of Heaven were closed to him, and that even Saint Peter himself would not have been able to prevail against them.

  She retooled both her diet and her husband's, forbidding him eating or doing anything which was not clearly conducive to conception.  Everything they ate was to be 100% organic.  She'd catch him drinking a beer, coffee or a caffeinated cola and wave under his protesting nose articles dutifully snipped from Fecund Christian Wife Weekly magazine.  Articles about studies somebody or other had allegedly done which strongly indicated possible connections between indulging in these kinds of things, and in somewhat reduced male fertility.  She threw away all of his usual underwear in favour of some mail order ones she'd bought him;, ones designed to increase male fertility.  Sometimes he refused to wear them and went to the college to lecture on Christian Women's Studies "commando."  Disgusting.  Childish. So unhygienic. If the young Christian women taking his courses had any idea what was going on, unbridledly unrestrained, in his pants... She barely suppressed a shudder.

  One time she actually caught him masturbating, just as her Christian wives magazines had warned in hundreds of articles with titles like "Self-Abuse: One Family's Private Tragedy!" and "How My Tragic Addiction To Interfering With My Own Body Robbed Me Of My Christian Marriage!"  (And it wasn't even Saturday!)  To make matters worse, Geoff had been performing the act while inspired by the diagrams in an article from one of her magazines entitled "How To Examine Your God-Given Child-Nurturing Breasts For Cancer Without Inciting Animal Lust In Your Heart!"
  Jane had had enough.  "Those are MY sperm!" she'd shrieked in delicate, submissive righteous indignation, holding aloft a squelchy Kleenex and waving it graciously at him.  "You have stolen them from my very birth canal!  You had NO RIGHT!  Clearly you don't even love Jesus anymore!"
  Geoff then had the unmitigated gall to look her straight in the eye while she was meekly laying out where he'd gone wrong as to scriptural precepts, and had actually mimed pleasuring himself, with a sneering disdainful look on his face the whole time, until she'd stormed long-sufferingly out of the room!  Jane didn't know how much longer she could go on.  She told everyone in her woman's bible study group all about the incident and they told her she'd need the support of every one of them to endure the man and his obvious war against what was clearly laid out in God's Word.

  Then, as eventually happened with the manna from Heaven sent to the Israelites of old, in May her period did not come.  It was almost too good to be true.  Had her dutiful submission to What Jesus Wanted finally made one of her Saturday Evening Scriptural Unions with Geoff fruitful?  She'd just known if she made the house as pure as she kept her body, that God would honour her obedience to what was so clearly laid out in His Word for her to follow.  Because it was all up to her.  Only her.

  Four pregnancy test kits and a doctor's visit confirmed her wildest hope: she was pregnant!  Just as Jesus wanted!  God was honouring her obedience and rewarding it with blessing, as He had promised in His word always to do!  She stopped the Saturday night activities entirely at this point, of course.  After all, what was the use?

  Geoff left her a month later for a nineteen year old Christian Women's Studies major who shared his love of the Song of Songs. He claimed it was over the magazines.  He actually had the nerve to say they were weird.

  "Imagine if someone had a collection of magazines about nothing but Christianity and cocks and balls and getting women pregnant.  Someone not gay, I mean," Geoff clarified with a snarl, as he got into his car.  "Don't you see how weird that was for me?  Maybe you shouldn't have thrown out my magazines about women's private bits!" And with this completely unfair sally he drove away putting, Jane felt, an unneccessarily forceful pressure on the gas pedal.
  What was wrong with men?  Were they completely blind to the Wonders of God's Creation?  Were they such slaves to their own Equipment that they had no interest in what God had designed women's bodies to do for Him?  When would they learn to take an interest inside Women's bodies?  Men truly looked on the "outward appearance" only.  They were all just penises with shoes, the lot of them.  If she hadn't been a submissive Christian woman, she told herself, she'd have called him a misogynist. He obviously hated women.

 

  The months wore on.  Jane was, of course, on some level, heart-broken, but at least, she told herself, the question of who was really following Jesus (and just really being obedient to God Word each day) was now settled once and for all.  For all Geoff's claims that she made an idol of children and pregnancy and the family in general, now there could be no argument.  It was she who was truly, meekly, submissively following scripture.  The ladies in her woman's bible study group all agreed.  Geoff was actually filing for divorce, unheeding of how clearly against scripture this was.  This made her feel even better.
  As the tiny life grew inside her, Jane was aglow with the possibilities.  She bought many, many Christian Pregnancy books. She took special "Expecting Christian Moms" vitamins and Quiverfull Supplements.  She took Christian Pre-natal classes, explaining to everyone there on a weekly basis that sadly, her husband had forsaken the things of the Lord and followed the mute, primal calling of his own depraved flesh with a wanton Jezebel from the college.  Jane positively lived for ultrasounds and doctor's appointments.  She managed to get her doctor to agree that she was a Special Case which bore scheduling thrice the usual number of appointments, particularly for ultrasounds (or her "Family Pictures," as Jane called them).

   Above all, Jane read books with charts which told her about the normal development of a God-fearing Christian fetus.  She regularly entreated Helen the ultrasound technicians as to whether Helen felt the development of her little one was going according to schedule.  If things were going perhaps even slightly ahead of schedule, Jane filled with the satisfaction of knowing that her dutiful attention to the tenets of scripture were truly paying off.  If Helen felt that perhaps the child was a pound less than the statistical average (as happened at 17 weeks, 27 weeks and 29 weeks), Jane panicked and just knew that if she'd lived the previous week more according to what Jesus wanted, she would have made her child develop more normally.  It was all up to her and her alone.
   But in week 29, Jane knew that if she continued in her current path of occasionally wavering faith and inconsistent devotion to scripture, her child could well be born with webbed toes like that Hall girl.  Jane's path was clear.  More reading.  Stricter diet.  No reading the covers of supermarket magazines at the checkout.  If she'd been occasionally making her womb such an inhospitable environment for a Christian fetus, what was she expecting?  It was time to really get serious. Jesus wants us to get serious.

  And so she kept at it.  She ate mountains of broccoli (God's Cure-All, Pregnancy Wonderdrug!), avoided seasonings of all sorts (including the leeks and garlicks of Egypt), and ate only Ezekiel bread (baked perfectly according to the original recipe laid out in scripture by God Himself, minus, of course, the human excrement).

  Eventually Jane's due date loomed tantalizingly closer.  On average, a woman as far along as Jane was would tend to give birth, the doctor felt, this coming Wednesday somewhere around three in the morning.  Jane was ecstatic.  This Wednesday she'd finally meet her little boy outside her body, after having given birth to him completely naturally, having felt each and every blessed birth pang without benefit of drugs, and then would continue her good work of raising him to just really value the special gift that God had given to women!  For months she'd been putting her CD player against her swollen belly and playing inspirational music and "Focus on the Family" sermons so he could be born already steeped in knowing What Jesus Wanted.

  On Tuesday Jane faithfully and quietly packed her things in a small bag and took a taxi to the gleaming metal and glass hospital late in the evening after watching Dr. Quinn.

  "What are you doing here, Jane?" the medical receptionist in the little powder blue E.R. waiting room asked.  "Have your contractions started?"  Jane's contractions had not started.

  "I'm just going to sit here and wait until it is The Lord's Time for me to give birth in the wee hours of this morning," Jane said. "It should start at any point now.  I just have a really good feeling about it, y'know?  It's just so clear in scripture."

  "Why don't you just go home and wait until the contractions indicate that it is time," the receptionist suggested.

  "Because I'm a Christian," Jane explained.  "I'm just really living for my Lord and acting in faith, truly trusting Him to bring His little one to term when it is His Own Good Time in a few hours. Everything is going to work out as it should.  I just know it, with the eyes of faith. Do you know Jesus?"

  The receptionist left Jane there reading Wombs For Jesus!, and walked away to get some coffee, shaking her head slightly. What a phenomenal testimony Jane knew she was being!

  The next morning, an exhausted Jane woke up to find the sun had risen and was shining in through the off-white venetian blinds in the waiting room at the hospital where she sat slumped in a not-particularly-comfortable waiting chair.  She looked down at herself. Disappointingly, the baby had not come in the night.  First Jane was confused.  Then suddenly she was angry, as only a woman who truly believes in God can be:

  "How could you do this to me?!  What is wrong with you?  Haven't you seen what I've done for you and how obedient and dutiful I've always tried to be?  What I've sacrificed for you and given up and endured?  I've always done my very best, and now this... I cannot believe this...It makes me doubt positively everything!" Jane shouted at her round belly.

  Then the self-doubt and recrimination that had been trained into Jane from birth slowly took hold.  "Here I am doubting.  How awful.  And what have I done?  Like Peter, James and John I have fallen asleep just when I was supposed to be watching!  Shame on me!  Shame!"  

  Jane took a taxi home, with her head held low, tightly clutching her small overnight bag, baby firmly in utero.

    Jane sat on her brown couch watching the clock on the microwave.  She slept some more.  She watched Road to Avonlea.  Still, not a thing.  She felt ashamed of herself for sleeping, but though the spirit was willing, the flesh was so weak.  She threatened to call her son "Lazarus" if he didn't blessed well come forth immediately.  Thursday evening came and went.  And Friday dawned clear and bright.

  Jane's doctor phoned to ask "Anything yet?" and Jane had to admit that though the Christian fetus within her had stirred from time to time, it had clearly not heeded John Piper's recorded advice to "rise early and be diligent!" which Jane had been broadcasting to him through her belly fluid.  Infant sluggard.  "Okay.  We'll give him until tomorrow, and then we'll have to talk about inducing," the doctor said before hanging up.

  Inducing?  Jane was at first delighted and reassured at the very idea that she need not to be held captive by nature, by the Little Tyrant within her.  Then her self-doubt and recrimination training predictably caught up with her racing thoughts:
 Would this be natural, though?  Wouldn't it be cheating God?  Wouldn't it be trying to snatch the reward from His Reluctant Fingers before His Own Good Time had Come?  Jane wept bitterly, feeling horribly ashamed at the very things she'd actually been considering doing. Why, she was no better than an abortionist!  Apart from actually killing a Christian baby, she was agreeing to let the doctor do almost precisely what abortionists did every day of their heinous lives! Laying a finger on what was not Man's place to meddle in.

  Jane now knew what she had to do.  She didn't know why she hadn't thought of this before.  There were no hospitals mentioned in scripture.  Not even one!  No obstetricians or gynecologists.  She was pretty sure there was a midwife in there somewhere, though.  She didn't remember where, but she did remember an inspiring interview with an elderly Christian midwife in January's My Ovaries Are His!  This pillar of faith had delivered four hundred and fifty three babies in her lengthy career, and had never once in all that time missed cooking her pastor husband his supper.

  One phone call, and an hour later a Christian midwife was at Jane's door.  Susan was a sturdy young woman who'd never had a child herself (not being married, despite going to bed early every night, and taking vitamins every morning with her daily chapter of scripture.)  She was a duly certified Christian midwife, having received her training at an institution whose credentials are, amazingly, still unrecognized by the American Medical Association to this day.

  That evening was the best evening Jane had spent in recent memory.  She was finally doing things just as Jesus wanted.  All of the doubt was blessedly gone.  She had a Christian midwife rather than a somewhat snarky, coldly clinical, science-obsessed unbelieving female doctor.  The house had been purged of magazines which were about...that...instead of about nearly virginal Christian childbirth. The walls rang with songs about singing about Jesus and cervix dilation.  Susan even had a hymn which she was happy to teach Jane, written by a godly midwife precisely to be sung for the glory of God while the Gates of Motherhood parted like the Red Sea, gracing the world with yet another Christian to sing His praise!

  When the baby finally came, Jane felt completely fulfilled.  She endured the suffering of the pain of childbirth brought about by Eve's disobedience without resorting to any drugs or other aids besides a bit of Tylenol and some ice packs.  Her problems were over. Her life was on track for good.  No more backsliding.
  Her little boy would grow up understanding about the bible and women, and would serve the Lord as no man had ever served the Lord before.  He would be a Mighty Warrior for God.  This little boy wouldn't be nasty like so many of the other Christian men Jane and Susan had known.  He wouldn't steal glances at women's God given chests while he was talking to them.  He would value God's Special Gift to women, and would one day seek out a godly, virtuous, submissive help-meet like her, just like the one described in Proverbs 31 (only with less unbecoming focus on entrepreneurship and export/import ventures) and go on to plant an army of stalwart Christian Soldiers in her obedient, on-fire-for-Jesus belly.
  If all went well, as Jane now trusted her Lord it would, due to her adherence to His Word, she could raise her little one to be just as giving, gracious, forgiving and mild as she was, and not like his lustful, hypocrite of a father who, sadly, only wanted One Thing.  She had only the one child, so he would be fortunate enough to be receiving her full, undivided attention right through childhood.

  Jane called his name Ephraim, and as she suckled him in the darkness after Susan left, the silence broken only by a CD of John Piper laying a beat-down on Christians who weren't Serious For God, she knew she was doing exactly what Jesus wanted.